Dan Browne

Birth : , Montreal, Quebec, Canada

History

Dan Browne is a filmmaker, photographer and multimedia artist whose works explore patterns and nature through dense and kinetic forms. His films and videos have been presented at over one hundred festivals and venues internationally, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Diagonal Film Archive, Centre Georges Pompidou, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Wavelengths at the Toronto International Film Festival and Early Monthly Segments. His multimedia work "memento mori" (2012) received the Jury Prize for Best Canadian Work at WNDX Festival of Moving Image, First Prize at Athens International Film + Video Festival, and the Deluxe Cinematic Award at Images Festival. Dan's media practices also encompass live performances in collaboration with musicians, and video installations that have received public commissions in Toronto and Vancouver. He has collaborated with other Canadian filmmakers, including Peter Mettler, Michael Snow, Carl Brown, R. Bruce Elder and members of the Loop Collective. He lives and works in Toronto.

Movies

Three Bagatelles for Marie Menken
Director
Three brief garden glimpses from the perspective of an insect or a grain of pollen. An attempt to capture, in the words of Marie Menken, "the flying spirit of movement within these solid objects."
Vienna
Director
A meditation on timeless landscapes and the transience of vision.
Palmerston Blvd.
Director
Intimate and elegant, Dan Browne's Palmerston Blvd. depicts the world within and outside a bay window, captured over the course of a year, where seasons sweep by with the speed of a day or a setting sun.
Images of Images
Director
I was commissioned to make the trailer for the Images Festival on the occasion of their 30th anniversary, and so opted to do a deep dive into their archives to assemble a collage (in chronological order) of the images (and people) of Images. Music by Karl Fousek
Island
Director
Rainbow glimpses after a stormy day on Kawagama Lake.
ROYGBIV
Director
Fragments of a rainbow landscape.
Taylor Creek
Director
Notes towards a compost-based vision.
Concrescence
Director
short film by Dan Browne
Generation
Director
Life cycles of a garden visit.
Reflections I
Director
A meditation on light and water; landscape as self-portraiture.
Seasons: Fall
Director
Fragments of a forest trail - a path traveled many times, never the same way twice.
Reflections II
Director
A meditation on light and water; landscape as self-portraiture.
Passage
Director
A lost portrait of my brother.
Gulf
Director
This film was shot on the north shore of Cuba, looking towards the Gulf of Mexico, just months before a massive dead zone was created by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which leaked 4.9 million barrels of oil between April 20-July 15, 2010.
Field
Director
An afternoon spent in an orchard picking fruit with family. "In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting."
Extended Primary
Director
A revisitation of my first film, extended from 2 minutes to 2 hours.
Parhelion
Director
An elemental study of refracted light in the multiple states of water (solid, liquid, gas). Also known as a 'sun dog', a parhelion is a halo in the sky formed by the interaction of sunlight with atmospheric ice crystals.
Grid031
Director
Generative computer animation
Heavenly Bodies
Director
As above, so below. Inner and outer realms collide in this audio-visual meditation on the surfaces of perception, as a wide range of archival materials and found footage from early Edison films to contemporary satellite images are deployed through a process of improvisation with live image-mixing software, conjuring an extended hallucinatory space-time journey.
Grid020
Director
Generative artwork from Dan Browne.
Christian’s Curtains
Director
This work was created in response to Christian Lebrat's installation, "R1R2R3R4 (Who's Afraid Of...)". Through rapid panning and tilting the camera it became possible to convert the installation's curtain panels into flickering colourful textures, reminiscent of "Holon" (1981).
Poem
Director
An ode to my daily environment, and to the presences of two beings: one arrived recently, the other recently left. The images merge in dreamlike passages that reveal the infinity of the potentials of vision within the finitude of everyday objects.
Alberta
Director
Journeys in Banff and Jasper National Parks, Alberta, along roads that cut paths through mountains into the sky.
Grid07
Director
5 minutes, HD Video, 2013
Nude descending (after Duchamp)
Director
An adaptation of the painting by Duchamp in commemoration of the centennial of its exhibition at the 1913 Armoury Show.
Pastoral
Director
Perceptions of an earthbound garden; a finite paradise filled with form, colour and sensation.
memento mori
Director
memento mori is a layered exploration of the total photographs captured over the course of a lifetime – over 100,000 in total. This personal archive, the dizzying documentation of a life, represents a plurality of subjects, objects, thoughts, dreams and experiences, forming an encyclopedic index of the possibilities of sight.
FLUX/FALL
Director
One of the purest representations of dreams.
Routes
Director
"Tree rhythms in the backyard of my parents’ house." Dan Browne
Frampton's Lemma
Director
Dan Browne's attempt to faithfully remake Hollis Frampton's 1970 film 'Zorns Lemma'.
Hand-processing
Director
A campfire for warming eyes and sight, somewhat akin to TV static. Produced by accident and chance, all the images in this film are achieved via tactile impact, the soundtrack acoustically interpreting the same abrasions.
Quanta
Director
Quanta is an investigative record of patterns found in the observable Universe, as contained within the perceptions of a Bolex taken for an afternoon excursion in a rowboat.
Numbers
Director
Numbers was created during a trip to Manhattan, where I caught my self-reflection in a glass door that read ‘41’ after having photographed the number 42 earlier the same day, and subsequently continued hunting until I found everything else between 1 and 100. Dedicated to Hollis Frampton. – D.B.
Midway
Director
Midway is composed of five rolls of Kodachrome Super 8 stock purchased from the Kodak plant in Toronto during the final days before it closed permanently. The rolls were already expired upon their acquisition, but despite this I held onto them for several years, waiting for a subject that would warrant the expenditure of such rare material. I eventually settled on the midway of the Canadian National Exhibition, a three-week long fair held annually in Toronto at the end of summer, after having working there for two years as a sound technician. The mechanical spinning rides, most of which have never been updated since my visits as a child, formed a suitable dance partner to my camera as a pair of declining technologies both still able to impart kinetic thrills.
Festival of Light
Director
A record of illumination on the darkest night of the year during an annual celebration held in Kensington Market, Toronto.
Recomposition
Director
A short visual study of repeating layers, dissolving forms reemerge and return.
Waterfilm
Director
Two film strips illuminated by passages of water: one aboard a ferry crossing the English Channel at day, the other on the banks of the Seine river at night. The soundtrack is generated directly by the projector 'reading' the images shot in Super-16mm.
On Sundays
Director
A record of textured surfaces and passing thoughts on an uneventful Sunday spent in quiet contemplation at home, accompanied by the passing memories of defocussed lights on a somnambulistic nighttime streetcar journey. Collaboration with Goran Simic for LIFT Poetry Projections II.
B Movie
Director
"A collage of decaying kung fu trailers strewn on a sidewalk close to my house. I reassembled them as best possible, from start to finish, incorporating as much as possible of the various bits found and adding my own touches of improvement." -Dan Browne.
Primary
Director
Impressions of a day in primary colours, applied to the eyes via paint, ink and clear leader.
Painting No. 2
Director
2.5 min | 16mm | colour | sound
Glimmer
Director
Amidst daily life in lockdown – homeschooling routines, a daughter's face, refractions of a crystal – time is reinvented as moments reverberating into the infinite.